Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Today in lavish excesses...

Finally, there's a way to get rich people in and out of film festivals without them having to take the roads like a bunch of barbarians. Uber, that service that allows you to summon total strangers to come pick you up and drive you places, is now offering helicopter rides.

Does anyone else think we're headed for another Bastille Day?

Above: Sundance Attendees trying tospend as little time as possible in Utah.

The service is being brought to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and will take attendees from Salt Lake City's airport to the event in Park City. Being choppered in from the airport only takes about fifteen minutes compared to the grueling forty minute schlep through the desolate hellscape that is the greater SLC metropolitan area, so the $200-$300 ride is clearly worth it. Well, if you're ridiculously wealthy and incredibly impatient. Those 'Sundance Official Selection' logos aren't going to hand themselves out.

"Woooooooooo!"

-Coachella Attendee

This isn't the first time Uber's offered a helicopter option to event attendees. There was an Uberchopper option available for people who like to watch cars drive in an endless circle at the Grand Prix Formula 1 races in Austin, and they've been airlifting trust fund hippies in and out of Coachella for a couple of years now. Oh yes, for just $3,000 the service will take you and four equally obnoxious friends to and from the annual music festival where you can take drugs and shout 'woooooooo!' at your favorite bands.

"Leave her, we've got to get J. J. Abrams to the Tribeca Film Festival, stat! "

If it sounds like I'm being irrationally judgey about this whole thing, it's because I am. Maybe it's because I associate helicopters with emergencies, like putting out forest fires or mercy flights. I get that Uberchoppers aren't necessarily tying up helicopter pilots who would otherwise be saving lives, but still it just seems, I don't know, douchy to take one to Sundance. It feels like a sure sign that we're heading towards an irreversibly lopsided society where the super-wealthy spend their time 'coptering between festivals while everyone sits in gridlocked traffic shaking a menacing fist skyward.

I don't know, maybe it just bothers me that excessive luxuries like Uber helicopters make think that those kids in the Guy Fawkes masks might have a point. About gross inequity, not the masks. Like, I don't think they get the mask thing at all.

Unless you're planning to blow up Parliament and put a Catholic king on the throne of England, you're wearing the wrong mask.